Stephen King's Dr. Sleep

Does Stephen King's New Sequel To The Shining Deliver?

Not only will the mundane signifiers of roadside U.S. life not protect us from the sub-mundane creatures of myth and legend, but in King’s world, evil has taken on a folksy, Americana-infused style of its own. Witness the vaudevillian troupe of bent-carny vampires as they hunt down Abra in their tourist-attraction ball caps and discount support hose; they have names like “Rose the Hat” and jeeringly refer to us ordinary mortals as “rubes.” They cloak themselves in the symbols of American life in a way that’s both unassuming and eerie, with “Token Charlie” recalling mis-spent coins and “Crow Daddy” bringing to mind that uncanny old bird who sees us and who remembers what he sees; Old Crow whisky, scarecrows, Skip James’ Crow Jane, buried 8 feet down and with a silver spade. These devils are American devils, at least for the moment, and draped in the clothing of America they prowl our highways.

At times, Doctor Sleep hits strange and allegorical notes; there is this old-timey wistfulness on the part of the True Knot quasi-vampires, who claim that “fifty years ago there was more of everything — oil, wildlife, arable land, clean air.” There is the sense that this predatory elite (you can build up quite a bank balance, as the novel points out, when you live for centuries) may have despoiled their garden, a question which gives parts of the story a vaguely Occupy Wall Street-ish tone. To claim Doctor Sleep as a mere economic allegory, though, does a disservice to the shadowy realm it purports to explore. Perhaps, in the end, spiritual wickedness in high places is not just a reflection of our disordered society; perhaps our disordered society is a reflection of it. In Doctor Sleep, as in King’s horror fiction in general, it often seems as if the True Knot are the opposite of not true.

Where Doctor Sleep succeeds is in its seamless depiction of a world very much like our own; you recognize the stores, the flyers, the regional expressions, but they exist alongside a shadow-realm of ancient witchery that is as real as any other roadside attraction. Where it is less successful is perhaps inevitable: The novel form requires both conflict and climax, and it is with a dramatic version of both that Doctor Sleep concludes. Somehow, a scene in which a character is gradually forced to realize that there really are ghosts and devils, and that they are watching and hunting us, is profoundly unsettling. A scene in which the same character actually gets in a fight with one, however, is somewhat less so.

In the end, conflict requires a degree of mutual knowledge, and it is in the light of this knowledge that horror, as both an emotion and a literary form, evaporates. The sighting of a Sasquatch is terrifying, but the sighting of a wild elephant (an arguably more alien-looking beast) is merely interesting. Once one accepts, as the characters of Doctor Sleep are forced to, that ancient parasitic folk-vampires are a real thing, and that we sometimes must confront them, we descend from the realm of horror to that of mere strife.

Perhaps it would not actually be so frightening to realize that there really are such things; it might be far more scary to just, on certain moonless nights, suspect that there could be.